&Now 2015: Blast Radius

Award-winning writer Thomas Frick and celebrated composer/pianist Vicki Ray propose a performance, a collaborative collision between text adapted from Frick’s “alchemical-Luddite” novel The Iron Boys and Ray’s signature prepared-piano soundscapes. In innovative language The Iron Boys explores, through the course of a book-length monologue by Corbel Penner, the ways in which the mechanistic manifestations of the factory system in the early nineteenth century, propelled by the new steam-powered machinery, subtly infiltrated both society and individual consciousness. Selected passages and fragments from the novel (which includes sermons, songs, fairytales, accounts of attacks on textile factories, meetings of secret societies, public hangings, musical concerts, love stories, and more) will conjoin, collide with, interrupt and be interrupted by, over- and underlie, and harmonize with the startling array of sounds possible on a piano mechanistically transformed through the use of interior preparations and extended techniques. The disruption of the music (and text) of life by the imposition of a new industrial reality (against which the Luddites were rebelling) will be metaphorically embodied in this collaborative performance.